Abstract: With the appearance of “Big Five” structure from lexical approach and five-factor model from theoretical approach, personality researchers have come to agreement on the taxonomy of personality. Although it seems that there are lots of similarities on the form and content between “Big Five” and FFM, in fact they are different in many aspects such as history, form and content, basic nature and future developmental direction. This article tries to distinguish them from each other to clarify related confusion and misunderstanding, and the implications to Chinese trait structure researches brought by two approaches are analyzed in the last part

Key words: five factor model, big five, phenotypic personality, genotypic personality